Logos ex Machina

This Saturday we have to pick a logo for the Dev Club, so Jake and I were talking about the possibility of writing a little app to design logos for us. It seemed appropriate.

So I built a rough little thing that would combine our name with this orbital-iron-manish-circle-graph, and set a bunch of the variables to random values.

and it made these:

Hooray for Programming!

Wouldn't it be nice.

Codecademy

Jake passed this awesome link to Codecademy, one (of the best) of a new breed of educational sites built just for us! (or at least it seems that way)

My goal with the dev club was to create an environment where learning to program is easier and more fun. Codecademy is a bizarrely perfect tool for that, and I can't wait to see what everyone does with it!

The Clubhouse!

Last night was fantastic! We met for the first time at The Clubhouse, and even had Fred, one of the founders, come to chat about what it's like to be a real live developer. 

Instead of doing the normal "topics of conversation list - I built a visualization for it while we were there. 

Fred showed off the Clubhouse's 3D printer. We finally had a great big screen to hook up to, so we're not all crowded around one person's machine, and we had way more seating and tablespace than my living room ever provided. The Clubhouse is great, and our little Dev Club is all the better for it.

For next time: Show and Tell! What are you working on? A game? Digital Art? Computation Physics? Bring whatever project is your beast or beauty of the day and show it off! The Dev Club is a cheering crowd and a place to share, and if we're not encouraging each other on the rocky road of learning to program, then we're doing it wrong.

But so far...we doing it really really right.

See everybody in 2 weeks!

Growing Fireball!

Tonight was fantastic! Topics of conversation included:

• The Clubhouse
• Baby Namerater & the importance of obvious interface
• Wireshark
• Ubuntu
• Cygwin the command line and Git
• The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing
• Dwarf Fauxtress 
• Kinematics and computational physics
• Druid and ecology simulations
• Banks and budgets and https
• NASA Rover Competitions

Not to count any chickens before they're hatched, but - it looks like we'll be moving our bi-monthly meetings to The Clubhouse! I'll be in touch with everyone over the next week or so to smooth out the details. Until then: happy coding!

The Clubhouse!

IS AMAZING!

Three of us went to check out the newborn hackerspace on Broad Street tonight, and OMG you guys: they have a 3d printer, they have nerds, they have robots!

These are our people.

I'll fill in some details tomorrow night at Dev Club, but for now:

• One of the founders beat Waterloo and UPenn at a NASA rover challenge
• There's a small 3D printer for club use
• Membership costs $100/month
• $50 for Military
• $50 for Students
• You get 24/7 access and a key
• You get a free pass to ALL their classes
• They're holding a competition for coolest Leap Motion app (the winner gets 3 months of membership free)
• They're hosting a TEDx next January
• It seems like most of the people there spent some time on the west coast
• They're only 2 months old
• They host several tech clubs already